Thursday, December 06, 2012

The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) is an agency of the United Nations, a world body largely populated with dictatorships, oligarchies, violent theocracies and other delightful governments. The ITU is, as you may have heard, making a play to takeover control of the Internet.

Yesterday morning, I wrote about the closed-door [ITU] meeting where they were working on standardizing "deep packet inspection" -- a technology crucial to mass Internet surveillance. Other standards bodies have refused to touch DPI because of the risk to Internet users that arises from making it easier to spy on them. But not the ITU.

The ITU standardization effort has been conducted in secret, without public scrutiny. Now, Asher Wolf writes:

I publicly asked (via Twitter) if anyone could give me access to documents relating to the ITU's DPI recommendations, now endorsed by the U.N. The ITU's senior communications officer, Toby Johnson, emailed me a copy of their unpublished policy recommendations.

OOOPS!

5 hours later, they emailed, asking me not to publish it, in part or in whole, and that it was for my eyes only.